Rodriguez on the Sin City DVD

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Unique features planned for the discs.

By Jeff Otto

Director Robert Rodriguez has long been an innovator in the film industry. He's a master of shooting professional quality films at rock bottom prices ever since his $7,000 El Mariachi lit the industry aflame in the early 1990s.

Most directors have budget problems and difficultly staying within the allotted amount they are given, but Rodriguez often turns his films in for less than the amount the studio gave him, with execs having to encourage him to go back and spend more of their money.

On the DVD front, Rodriguez has been an innovator as well. A big movie fan and DVD fan himself, he's always done his best to pack in as many features as possible so that fans get their money's worth when they pick up one of his discs. Each one of his DVDs thus far has included a ten minute film school, in which Rodriguez reveals some secrets from the making of his films and gives tips to prospective film auteurs of the future.

On From Dusk Till Dawn, Rodriguez gave a documentary crew full access to the production and released a feature-length film on the making of the movie, called Full Tilt Boogie. This was included with the two-disc special edition of Dawn on DVD.

For Sin City, which is about to hit theaters on April 1, Rodriguez already has some exciting new features planned for that DVD. We spoke with Rodriguez at the Four Seasons this past weekend and he gave some details on the upcoming Sin City DVD.

Sin City is based on three graphic novels by Frank Miller (who also co-directed the project). For the feature film, Rodriguez and Miller tied the three books together so that they could flow together as one movie. For the DVD, however, viewers will have the option of watching the whole film together or watching each book separately as they appeared in the novels, complete with new footage.

"We shot the full stories of the books," Rodriguez says. "And I knew we could truncate it down, we weren't going to lose any scenes. Eventually they would all be available for people to see. The DVD will come out with the theatrical cut, and then there will be a separate disc that's got the individual episodes separate with their own title card and you could just watch The Big Fat Kill from beginning to end in its full cut as a single story and then switch over and watch The Yellow Bastard, and that's 45 minutes. It will have all the material back in, so it will be like the experience of picking up the books where you pick up one story and you read it from beginning to end and it will have all the material in it. So you can kind of shuffle your own version of the movie and just watch them all separately."

The stories will feature additional scenes that will be familiar to fans of the graphic novels. "There were some things we had cut out from [Yellow Bastard] just to pace it for a feature because they weren't supposed to be three stories put together when he first wrote them, they were all separate books. So [there were] things to sort of pace it for a feature and keep it on a through line&#Array; Mickey Rourke doesn't go visit his mom now like he did in the book and get his gun, but we shot all that and it's all great stuff. It just wasn't necessary for the feature. You wanted to be more direct in that. It's not gonna feel like, when you watch that separate disc with this material back in like, 'Oh, I can see why that was cut.' They are really terrific scenes, action scenes, a lot of stuff that people will find. I think it's going to be somewhat revolutionary to see those scenes that were cut out [to] be put back in another format, because they seem perfectly fine and they work, they just needed to be taken out for the long haul of a feature."

Rodriguez says that planning for this feature ahead of time gave them an extra freedom during production. "It really gives it another life and another experience more akin to reading the books by doing that. That's what made it easier for us to say, 'Lets just shoot everything, prepare all the effects, and then if we edit stuff out, we're not really cutting it out and people are never going to see it. They'll be able to see it in a purer form in a different format."

The separate stories will be available together with the theatrical feature in one set. "Yes, in a package and then I'm gonna have another 10 minute, it'll be a 20 minute film school probably for this one because there's so many things. And I'll have another 10 minute cooking school. It will be Sin City breakfast tacos. (Laughs) We'll show you how to make a homemade flour tortilla and the best meal you can probably ever learn."